Garden Gate

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

It seems that everywhere I go lately, there are major concerns about water availability. In Southern California, dying grass covers some landscaped areas, and many fruit trees have not born any fruit due to the drought there. On the big island of Hawaii, a house we are staying in catches rainwater from the roof and that supplies the house's water. Near each faucet is a sign asking "Please Conserve Water".

The human population on this planet continues to grow, and resources continue to become increasingly limited. I wonder how long it can continue. But a resource such as water can make or break a population's ability to survive, or at least inhabit a place. Lack of it can lead to civil unrest and armed conflict.

I have continued to question the wisdom of lawns in the landscape, especially where water is limited in supply and grass is not native. I believe it is wiser to incorporate native plants that can accomplish some, if not all of the objectives that turf grass does: cover the ground, provide an aesthetically pleasing area, provide a contrast to surrounding plants. Whereas the objective of being able to tread upon it may not be met, there is an added benefit of other groundcovers that turf does not provide: habitat and food for wildlife - specifically pollinators.

There are many plants that can meet these objectives. Some of them can be invasive, such as English Ivy (Hedera helix) or wintercreeper (Euonymus fortunei). So one must use care when selecting these plants.

Another benefit of native groundcovers is that many will provide seasonal color, whether in leaf or flower, as well as interesting foliage.

Some people in drought-stricken areas, may choose to remove plants altogether. But many will not find this option visually pleasing, and miss the many benefits that plants provide.

When I used to teach landscape design classes, I would talk about xeriscaping to my students. Xeric plants are those which can withstand arid conditions. But some students made a joke out of the term, and called it zero-scaping. In a recent walk around a Los angeles neighborhood, I saw two plantings very near each other that illustrate a xeriscape and a zero-scape:

Recently-planted drought-tolerant plants

Drought tolerant plants

Zero-scape

Where I live, in Illinois, people aren't overly concerned about water usage, because we generally get enough rainfall to meet our needs for gardens and landscapes during the growing season.

But if you live in an area where water is an issue, consider some alternatives to the high-water-usage plants, plants that can provide valuable benefits to humans and the others who inhabit our natural world.

Monday, November 30, 2015

Today I had a chance to visit the beautiful LA Arboretum & Botanical Garden. I didn't plan this in advance, but made a spontaneous decision after finding out about it online last night. I was pleased to know that the LA Arboretum had a reciprocal agreement with the American Horticultural Society, so that I got a free admission. My husband qualified for a senior discount, which took $3 off his price. A great value for only $6! We spent three hours and could have used another hour or so to take in everything there was to see.

The first one to greet us after we paid admission was the fellow in the photo below.

The previous owner of this property, "Lucky" Baldwin, introduced peacocks and peahens (collectively known as peafowl) back in 1880 from India. They were good for the gardens because they ate snakes and kept snails in check.

The numerous gardens included areas of African, Australian, and native Californian plants; a rose garden, herb garden, and many other specialty areas. There were also some fountains, a large pond, and a waterfall.

Allen's hummingbird

Rufous hummingbird

Egret in the pond

The aloe walk was particularly interesting, and had numerous hummingbirds buzzing around the flowers.

There were other arid-land plants, too.

Saguaro

Barrel Cactus

...and animals!

Flower of the pink floss-silk tree

Glad we didn't overlook the orchid greenhouse...

And the historic coach barn was a surprise visual treat:

Looks vaguely familiar....!

It was a wonderful day. If you are interested, you can read more about the arboretum and it's history at this website: http://www.arboretum.org/.

Friday, April 12, 2013

Ahhhh, Spring! This is the time of year
that I always notice the busy activity of some ground-dwelling bees that live
near our house. They never bother you as you walk by, even though they are quite
numerous. A few years back when I was installing some steps in that area, I
noticed their small holes in the ground. That’s when I was reminded of the
solitary bees I had learned about in beekeeping class many years ago. Most
people are aware of honey bees, and more are becoming aware of their economic
importance in pollinating commercial crops. But most people have never heard
about the native bees that just don’t have the rock-star status of the non-native
honey bees.

It so happens that there are over 4,000
species of native bees in north America – and, bees are the most important
pollinator in most ecosystems in the world. Seventy-five per cent of the
flowering plant species in the world are pollinated by bees. Even commercial
crops that rely on honeybees for pollination are also visited by wild native
bees and other pollinators. Without pollination, flowers cannot develop into
seeds and fruits, which feed many birds and mammals large and small. As a
matter of fact, fruits and seeds derived from insect pollination are a major
part of the diet of approximately 25 percent of all birds, and
of mammals ranging from red-backed voles to grizzly bears.

Most native bees live solitary lives
rather than in colonies, such as honeybees do. And many live in the ground. So
they go mostly un-noticed by people most of the time. Unfortunately, wild bees
and other pollinators are experiencing declining populations, and possible
extinction. According to the Xerces Society, “Many of our native bee
pollinators are at risk, and the status of many more is unknown. Three bee species:
the rusty-patched, the yellow-banded and western bumblebee, have dropped in
number over the past decade. A fourth species, Franklins’ bumblebee has only
been seen once in the past several years. Habitat loss, alteration, and
fragmentation, pesticide use, climate change, and introduced diseases all
contribute to declines of bees.

To attract native bees and other
pollinators to your yard, add some food plants that provide pollen and nectar.
Grow a diversity of plant species to attract a diversity of pollinators. And
try to have something in bloom over a long period of time to provide a
continual supply of food. If you want to help the wild bees gain in social
status, you can go online and vote for them. Yes! You can vote for the
rusty-patched bumblebee to be featured on an Endangered Species Chocolate bar
wrapper. But, hurry, you only have until Sunday, April 21. (Got to www.xerces.org for details). After voting, go back to the Xerces
Society website and take the “Pollinator Pledge”. There, you can also learn
more about the wild native bees, some of whom may inhabit un-noticed areas in
your own backyard.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Using smart phone or tablet, you can surf the web, read a
review about a restaurant in the town you’re visiting, send an email, find out
how your friends halfway across the globe are doing, and post a blog. Some of
that technology is old-school now (a lot of people are so busy texting they
don’t have time to check their email). However, if you have already updated
your status on Facebook and caught up with your Facebook friends today, and still
have some time on your hands, you might want to check out some of these new
horticultural apps.

According to a person who considers himself and “App Hunter”
who specifically looks for free Ag and Hort apps, there are at least 120 that
fit into that category. If you do a Google search for Horticulture Apps, you
will pull up a list of sites that claim to list the “top ten” apps.

The New
York Times posted an article earlier this year with their top ten picks. They
include the app that helps you design a garden (Garden Tracker for IPad and
IPhone), and a landscaper’s companion app that can be used by either apple or
android products. I haven’t used this
one yet, but I expect I will be checking it out, since it includes images of
and information about approximately 20,000 trees, shrubs, annuals, perennials,
vegetables, and herbs.

You can also go to your app store to see what they offer. A
recent search in the Google Play Store for Apps turned up at least 50 gardening
related apps. Form gardening secret tips, to horticulture news, to gardening
games. Prices range from free to $24.99. There’s an app for warning you when
there’s danger of frost, and another to tell you what’s in bloom at the
world-class Kew Gardens in London.

Not so very long ago, organizations poured resources into
website development. There are continuing costs for upkeep and maintenance. For
apps, this includes a need to upgrade to ensure the apps work on new platforms
that come along.

According to the lead developer of the apps “IPMLite” and “IPMPro”,
costs for developing a basic, simple APP, (such as calculators to perform
specific formulas, etc.) are around $1,000 to $4,000. A database-driven APP,
such as the one she helped develop can run anywhere from $8,000 to $50,000. For
reference, Angry Birds cost somewhere around $125,000 to $180,000. Is it a lucrative
revenue stream? That remains to be seen for many agricultural and horticultural
apps. Angry Birds has reportedly made $50 million in revenue.

I wonder if apps will replace books, and even websites for
certain kinds of information in the future?

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

If a tree could BE a poem, as indicated by Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s
poem “I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree”, then I submit
that the swamp white oak makes a beautiful poem. With strong, almost muscular
limbs reaching out at ninety-degree angles from the broad trunk, there is
something quintessential in its architecture that lends it an air of majesty.

Native oaks in North America have long served useful purposes
of many different sorts. For example, the acorns feed over one hundred animal
species, and are even edible by humans when treated appropriately to remove the
bitter tannins. Those bitter tannins, also found in the bark of oak trees, have
their own application in tanning leather.

Oaks belong to the genus Quercus,
and include the tree that gives us cork, Quercus
suber. Most of the cork produced in the world comes from trees grown in the
Mediterranean region in the countries of Portugal, Spain, Algeria, and Morocco.
Yamaha uses oak wood in making drums, and drumsticks may also be made of oak,
although they do not absorb vibration as well as those made from hickory or
maple.

There are more than 50 species of oaks that are native to
North America, but some are native to other places, including Europe. William Cowper, English poet of the 1700s,
wrote of the oak: “I might with rev’rence kneel and worship thee, It seems
idolatry with some excuse - When our
forefather Druids in their oaks, Imagin’d sanctity…”, indicating a spiritual
connection to the great and powerful-seeming tree.

According to Diana Wells, author of “Lives of the Trees”, Druids
used oak leaves to make crowns for their sacrificial victims. She goes on to
suggest that the name Druid may have
originated from the Gaelic word for the oak tree, darach. Wells states that oaks were sacred to many gods. She lists
among them, Thor, Jupiter, and El, the Hebrew god.

The white oak, state tree of Illinois, has proved very useful
throughout history. Barrels for wine and whiskey are made from white oak, due
to the closed cellular structure that makes it water- and rot-resistant. Maturing
or fermenting wine in oak adds flavors to the wines such as caramel, vanilla,
and toffee, and sometimes gives wine a silky texture.

Oaks are famously associated with their fruit, the acorn. A
lot of oak species have lobed leaves, but there is a great deal of variability
in leaf shape. Oaks are generally divided into the red oaks and the white oaks,
with leaves of the white oak-types having rounded lobes and those of the red
oak types having pointed lobes. I think the bur oak has the most interesting
acorn, with a burly, fringed cap on a fairly large acorn.

The oak receives a lot of respect for both its usefulness and
symbolically. In 2004, the United States Congress passed legislation naming the
oak as the National Tree. Oak leaves are used in military insignia, including
the awarded oak leaf cluster worn by members of the U.S. Army, Air Force, and
Department of Defense for subsequent awards of a Purple Heart, Bronze Star, and
other awards of merit.

Oaks have a long, varied, and interesting history. But poems
are often short and to the point. If a picture paints a thousand words, then may
the image of one magnificent oak pay tribute to them all.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Here in Illinois, surrounded by the vast acreage of
agricultural corn and beans, we have a special vantage point from which to
appreciate our ancient heritage of agriculture. Seeing the corn emerge from the
ground, well past danger of frost, renews that annual feeling of optimism that this
will be a good harvest year.

It is easy to forget that, with all our modern technology of
machinery and global positioning systems to aid our efforts, we have the
ancient Olmec people to thank for the basic technology on which all of this is
founded. After all, they have not only been cultivating maize (an alternative
term for corn, based on its botanical name Zea
mays) for several thousand years, they purposely selected seeds year after
year for traits such as larger kernels, increased number of rows of kernels,
and the ability of an ear to hold onto its seeds long enough for it to be
harvested.

They developed
agricultural systems, too. The milpas
of Guatemala and Mexico are maize fields in which a dozen or so crops are grown
together. Melons, tomatoes, amaranth, squash and beans are often included.
According to archeologists and others, the crops grown are nutritionally
complementary. They say that the amino acid composition –the building blocks of
protein - of the different plants complement each other. In that way, complete
proteins can be had, and nutritional deficiencies can be avoided.

Apparently, the milpa system
of growing corn was imported and dispersed throughout what is now the United
States along with the corn itself.In
the northeastern U.S., for example, the Iroquois teach the growing of corn, beans
and squash together in a system called “Three Sisters” gardening. The Legend of
the Three Sisters indicates the strong cultural, and even spiritual, connection
that existed between people and the food they cultivated.

Nutritionally, corn and beans combine to provide complete
protein. Agriculturally, beans fix nitrogen in a symbiotic relationship with
soil microbes. That is, the microbes take gaseous nitrogen from the air and
transform it into a form plants can take up and use. The nutrients become
available to the high-nitrogen-using corn the following year. Modern farmers in Illinois use a system of
rotation to accomplish a similar benefit from growing soybeans. Other beans, or
legumes, as they are also known, can
provide this benefit. Thus, clovers and vetches are often used as cover crops
for that purpose.

The development of maize as a food source is an intriguing
and astonishing story, the roots of which are as yet not entirely clear. It
almost certainly began with a grass-like plant called Teosinte (from the Nahuatl
“grain of the Gods”), and is thought to have been aggressively bred by
people in or near southern Mexico over six thousand years ago. Maize researchers
speak of landraces, or locally-adapted genetic types of maize. At least fifty
genetically distinguishable types have been identified in Mexico alone.
Estimates of as many as five thousand landraces may exist in the southern
Mexico-Central American region.

American farmers of today still rely on the development of
genetic types – or cultivars, as we now call them (for cultivated variety). Thousands of corn cultivars have been
developed and hybridizing is an ongoing process, allowing farmers to select the
ones best suited to their growing conditions.

So, the cycle continues, and most certainly will continue
indefinitely. As we watch and wait for yet another harvest, it is good to take
a step back and appreciate the heritage we have received from those who have
gone before and made life as we know it possible.

Sunday, May 20, 2012

I had one of those jewels of the bird world visit my
geranium last week – yes, a hummingbird. As I do every summer, I started out
early with a brightly colored feeder filled with the sweetest of sugar water.
And, as they do almost every summer: they ignored it. But they do something
else every summer, at least in my yard: they visit the nectar-bearing flowers.
They are most noticeable when the hostas are blooming in August. But I have
also seen them on my zinnias, which I knew attracted butterflies, but I had
never noticed a hummingbird on them before.

One thing that struck me about the hummingbird’s attraction
to the hosta flowers, is that those flowers are white, not red, like most of
the hummingbird feeder and feed mixes available. It turns out that hummingbirds
are more interested in the sweetness of the nectar than they are in the color
of the flower.

I think everyone who attracts hummingbirds counts themselves
lucky. If you want to attract them with flowers keep these guidelines in mind:
the sweeter the flower the better; tubular shaped flowers are best for
hummingbirds; and you should provide flowers that bloom over a long period of
time. You can accomplish this by providing a succession of blooms from spring
through fall. For a list of flowers that should do the trick,
Birdsandblooms.com/hummingbirds has some useful information including pictures
of the flowers they recommend.

Besides nectar, hummingbirds also eat insects, favoring
those that are minute enough to be swallowed whole. They have been observed
hovering at the bark of a tree, hunting for those tiny spiders and insects.
Researchers in Michigan counted ruby-throated hummingbirds as the primary
visitors to the small pits that yellow-bellied sapsuckers had drilled into
trees to capture sap. The hummers ate the sap as well as the insects they found
that were also attracted to the sap.

It is generally accepted that hummingbirds originated in the
equatorial belt region across South America. That is where the greatest number
of species has been found. Of the 320 species of hummingbirds known, more than
half live in that region, with diminishing numbers of species found as you move
north and south of the equator. Costa Rica supports 54 species, Mexico has 51
species, western North America has 12, and eastern North America has only one:
the ruby-throated.

The ruby-throated hummingbird breeds as far north as
southern Canada, and may winter as far south as Panama. When they migrate
across the Gulf of Mexico, it requires them to make a continuous flight of more
than 500 miles. How long would that take, you wonder? Thanks to studies
conducted by Crawford Greenewalt we know that the top speed of a female ruby-throat
is 27 miles per hour. So, at top speeds, this leg of the journey would take
over eighteen hours!

How lovely for us to have this one unique, feathered jewel
of summer, to bring their special beauty to our gardens.

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About Me

I taught classes across the spectrum of horticulture and landscaping for 18 years. I have experience in plant breeding, fruit tree culture, vegetable and flower gardening, tree and shrub care, turf management, and plant propagation.